Cons

Bottom Line

The Garmin Vivoactive 3 is an attractive, durable wearable that hits the sweet spot between fitness tracker and smartwatch functionality.

23 Feb 2018

The Garmin Vivoactive 3 ($269.99) is one of the most full-featured fitness trackers with smartwatch functionality you can get. It manages everything from contactless payments to stress measurement. While it doesn't track the most advanced running metrics, like foot-ground contact time, it does calculate cadence, pace, and distance using GPS. If you use it with an Android phone, you can even reply to text messages directly from the watch. It could stand to be a bit thinner and lighter, but you'd have to lose the heart rate monitor to make that happen. If you're a fitness enthusiast in the market for an everyday watch and tracker, this is the one to get, and our Editors' Choice.

At a Glance

Handsome yet simple with a round face, the Vivoactive 3 works as casual wear, a gym accessory, and even with business attire, provided you swap the silicone band for something more upscale. The standard size bands and swap out easily with a little spring-loaded lever you can press with a fingernail. The watch comes in three styles: white with stainless steel, black with stainless steel, and black with slate, which costs at little more than the others at $299.99.

Versatile as it is, the Vivoactive 3 feels the tiniest bit thicker and heavier than I prefer. Size is relative, so I should mention that I'm five feet eight inches tall and not petite. The heft (1.5 ounces, which is objectively not that heavy) and bulk are due to the optical heart rate monitor.

The original Garmin Vivoactive, which does not have a heart rate monitor, weighs about 1.3 ounces. I still own and love that watch. It set a high bar for the weight I'm willing to tolerate on my wrist. And quite frankly, I don't mind not knowing my heart rate 24/7, and the trade-offs of getting rid of the sensors will be worthwhile to some. For example, eliminating the heart rate monitor increases the battery life from one week to three in smartwatch mode. It's also much more comfortable to wear while sleeping, typing, and swimming. Still, compared with other watches with heart rate monitors, the Vivoactive 3 is on the compact side.

Battery

The Vivoactive 3 ships with a proprietary USB charger that snaps securely into the back of the watch. A full battery lasts up to 13 hours with the GPS running and up to seven days in smartwatch mode.

When in smartwatch mode, you can see the time and date, or whatever you choose for your watch face, on the screen at all times. When you raise your arm, the face illuminates. The screen is in full color and supports touch input. A single physical button on one side and grooved edge on the opposite side also help you navigate the screens.

Features and Smart Functionality

Jam-packed with features, the Vivoactive 3 runs the gamut of being excellent for fitness tracking, running, and as a smartwatch.

As a fitness tracker, it counts steps, stairs, sleep, heart rate all day and night, calories burned, number of active minutes per day, and stress (using heart rate VO2 max and other data). It also supports a long list of activities you can track both indoors and outdoors, such as running, walking, bicycling, aerobic exercise, swimming, strength training, yoga, and many others. You can customize which activities show up on the watch so that you can track your favorite ones easily.

There's a move reminder that nudges you to get up if you've been still for too long, an alarm with vibration, and one of my favorite features, a do-not-disturb button in the settings that silences notifications.

For running and outdoor activities, the Vivoactive 3 uses GPS. It also has smart enough motion sensors to calculate running cadence, even during treadmill runs.

In terms of smartwatch functionality, the Vivoactive 3 cover the bases, with support for incoming notifications of all kinds, remote controls for music and podcasts, a screen displaying current weather conditions, and so forth. You can further customize what's on your watch by adding apps from the Garmin Connect IQ app store. One of my favorites displays the current time in time zones you choose. That said, it doesn't have the same extensive collection of third-party apps available for the Apple Watch.

One added capability not yet found in other Garmin watches is support for contactless payments using Garmin Pay. (It will be offered in the Forerunner 645 and Forerunner 645 Music when those devices launch.) You enter a credit card in the Garmin Connect mobile app, add a PIN, and then use your watch anywhere contactless payments are accepted to make purchases. For the purchase to go through, you have to enter your PIN on the watch itself, but you don't need your phone on hand for it to work. The specific credit cards that are supported vary by country; as of this writing, Visa and Mastercard work in the US.

Whether you'll actually use Garmin Pay is another story. I've had my heart broken numerous times over the promise that NFC or other cashless-cardless payment systems would become universal in the US. I'm no longer holding my breath.

Accuracy

In accuracy, the Garmin Vivoactive 3 performed extremely well. I compared daily steps, distance during activity, heart rate at rest, heart rate at low intensity activity, and heart rate at high intensity activity with a few different pieces of equipment.

For daily walking, I compared the step counts from the Vivoactive 3 with the Misfit Ray. After four days of tracking, they were on average about 600 steps different, about a quarter mile, but they were not consistent in how they were different. On two occasions the Ray's readings were higher and on two the Vivoactive's were higher.

On a treadmill walk and run, the distance recorded by the Vivoactive 3 matched that of the Wahoo Tickr X almost exactly. The treadmill itself clocked about 0.1 mile more. The Vivoactive 3 gives you the opportunity to adjust the mileage for a treadmill walk to help calibrate it, so if you're sure your treadmill is accurate, you can align the watch to the same measurements.

Heart rate readings were nearly matched those of the Tickr X, too, typically lagging behind by just a second or so whenever my heart rate changed. Otherwise, they were always within two or three beats of one another at rest, during both low- and high-intensity activity. Those numbers also lined up with readings from the treadmill's handgrip heart rate sensors, again with a very short lag.

Comparisons and Conclusions

The Garmin Vivoactive 3 has just about every feature you'd want and expect from a fitness tracker, plus a few extras—stress readings, contactless payments, cadence measurements, ability to reply to texts when paired with Android—that make it more technologically luxurious. You can wear it in the pool and track swimming as an activity, or use it during a weight-lifting session to count reps. And with the Connect IQ app store, you can further customize the watch's capabilities and informational screens. It's supremely multi-purpose, but still easy to use and gets the core elements right.

As to price, at $269.99, it's not an impulse buy. That said, Garmin watches have a reputation for lasting a long time. It's a good price for a device that does so much, especially if you don't intend on replacing it for five or six years. The Fitbit Ionic costs more, and its style, with a square face instead of round and a more streetwear look, is less versatile.

If Garmin sold the same watch but without the heart rate monitor, I'd still buy it, and I might even prefer it for being a touch lighter and thinner. As is, it's still one of the best fitness products we've tested. Garmin really hits the sweet spot with the Vivoactive 3, and earns our Editors' Choice.

Before joining PCMag.com, she was senior editor at the Association for Computing Machinery, a non-profit membership organization for computer scientists and students. She also spent five years as a writer and managing editor of Game Developer magazine, ... See Full Bio